Russian journalist Elena Milashina

Women and the U.S. Supreme Court

This may be of interest to some book club members: the Huntington Library is having a lunch seminar on women and the supreme court.

Update from I Live Here

This is a book we read recently- here is an update from Malawi

For November/December: Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

For our meeting on December 1st, we are reading a new book by Pulitzer prize winning journalists and husband and wife, Nicholas Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn: Half the Sky .

Please note, we will only be discussing the first half of the book for the next meeting (Chapters 1-7)

The book is already a 'movement', and they have a website

There will be additional interesting items of information here in the coming weeks, so check back- in the meantime, here is a link to the HRW work on women's rights worldwide.

October 13th: Tales from Entebbe

For October this year, we will be reading a collection of stories written by one author:

Tropical Fish: Stories from Entebbe, by Doreen Baingana. Listen to an NPR interview of the author here.

The stories are set in Uganada after Idi Amin, and told in the voices of sisters. To read more about Idi Amin, please read this article HRW wrote after Idi Amin's death in 2003.

You can also listen to this great podcast from HRW, interviewing Andrew Rice's book on Idi Amin's Uganda and international justice. If you are interested in other books about human rights and Uganda, you may want to start with this one.

To read more about Uganda, check out the BBC's country profile page.

You can also find the book and read a little bit on Google Books.

HRW reports that include information on women's rights in Uganda in the context of violent conflict and in the context of HIV/AIDS are worth a look.

Reading HRW's recent news releases, it is clear that Uganda is still a country struggling with human rights issues: just this month, police have used lethal force on civilian protests; they continue to detain citizens without trial or charge and use torture, enforced disappearances, and forced confessions in anti-terrorism arrests; and the LRA (Lord's Resistance Army), led by Ugandan rebels, is still contributing to violence and disorder in Congo, while Ugandan forces are still in Congo after a failed operation against the rebels.

Book Club leader Ellen reports from Charles Taylor's trial in The Hague

Please read this wonderful note that Ellen has written describing the trial of Charles Taylor- and thank you Ellen for taking the time to share your experience with us!!

Just to remind everyone: the next book club meeting is September 1. Contact the office for details.

Please mark your calendars, and RSVP for directions!

If you did not get the email invite from the HRW office, please contact the office and/or email Christina to be put on the list!

From Ellen:

July 14

After a two week holiday from politics, I spent my last day in the Netherlands at the International Criminal Court, sitting in the visitors gallery at the Sierra Leone Special Court, convened on the outskirts of The Hague, in a gleaming, tall, new white building (surrounded by prison like wire), to try Charles Taylor for crimes against humanity. It is called the Sierra Leone Court because actually Taylor is being tried, not for what he did in and to Liberia, but for what he did collaterally in and to Sierra Leone. And in The Hague, because to try him in SL risks domestic destabilization. Why both of these things is the case, I don’t exactly know.

In both of my book groups this spring, coincidentally, I read books on the chaotic and deadly politics of Liberia in the 1980s and 1990s. For Human Rights Watch, we read the autobiography of Ellen Sirleaf Johnson. For my other group, we read Russell Banks’ the Darling, in which Taylor is a character – who the lead character, a woman renegade from Weatherman, helps spring from jail, near Boston, I believe in the 1980s. (The imprisonment and escape are true.) In that group we spent a lot of time googling Taylor because we wanted to find out if he was on trial, indeed whether he was alive. We learned that he had eluded capture for a while – with the help of what African country, I cannot remember – but was in The Hague awaiting trial. So when I realized that the trial was indeed on and here I was a brief train ride away – a woman tourist, a judge from the US, told me this in a casual conversation about a week and a half ago – I thought I really had to go. If only to tell my fellow bookgroupmates that I had followed through when I could. Also, I thought about how I had one day when I was a graduate student gone to the trial of the Chicago Seven (Eight?) and saw Bobby Seale chained and gagged in the courtroom. This seemed a similar thing I should do.

I spent a long time trying to figure out on the web what procedure was necessary to sit in the gallery – I finally called the court at which time a guy said, 'oh, just come down and you can attend'. It was a day I really wanted to keep busy, for personal reason, so I decided to go. If I couldn’t get in, I would go to one of the museums in The Hague. I invited my student Jen Musto, who is in the Netherlands working on her dissertation this summer, to come with me but in the end she got an eye infection. So I went myself.

I arrived in Voorburg, one of those wealthy suburbs of the Hague much like Waasenaar, a little before noon, was easily directed to the building, and within ten minutes found myself sitting with fifty other people in a small gallery separated by a glass wall from the court. Taylor’s back was to us but we could see him on a video screen. Facing him and us was a bank of four judges, two men and two women, two black and two white, with black robes, and red and white collars. And on either side of them, barrister-outfitted camps of lawyers and assistants, prosecution and defense. A few police men and women. And everyone looking absolutely stony faced, not animated by Taylor’s presence but not bored by the endless questions and answers. Only one older very black lawyer on the defense side occasionally shook his head yes that’s right to Taylor’s answers.

I sat for 45 minutes until the lunch break, after which I returned for another hour so, at which time I moved over, and was sitting directly behind Taylor in the middle of the front row. And yet, because of the glass, the stark modernism of the room, and the strange monologue Taylor delivered, assisted by his lawyer (“help us, Mr. Taylor,” he would frequently say about some detail he wanted to fill in) about his life and his leadership (as he saw it) of the Liberian wing of the African independence movement, I could not keep my attention on the fact that I was sitting behind one of the great mass murderers of the late twentieth century. Perhaps this speaks to the kind of weird legitimation that critics of human rights procedures insist such bloodless (what a word in this context) legal procedures produce. Sitting like this, he didn’t seem a monster but a man in the grip of his own absolute conviction about his important place in history; and/or well prepared by his legal team. He is 61 years old – just a few months younger than me. He wore, of course, an elegant suit and tie and impeccable white shirt with four inch starched cuffs. The back of his neck, which is what I saw directly, had a roll of fat and close cropped, partly bald hair. He moved his thin, elegant hands constantly to emphasize his points, once even apologizing to “your honors” for speaking so much with his hands. What a thing for him to apologize for! To show that he was thoughtful and respectful of the law? He wore sunglasses, and sat alone facing the judges. His computer screen wasn’t on, he didn’t drink his water, he didn’t use his pen and paper. He relished answering the questions his lawyer put to him, as if, I thought, he really loved recalling the historic movements – African liberation, student politics of the 1970s, collaborating with Samuel Doe after the assassination of William Talbert.

I hadn’t realized that the trial had been going on for some time, and, as I learned this morning from the IHT, the prosecution had rested. Its presentation was made up of people who had colluded with Taylor and with people who had been victims of the violence over which he had presided. Many had had their hands hacked off. One person was asked by Taylor’s elegant black British lawyer, do you speak and write English, and the person, showing his stumps, said I write nothing. What would it have been like to have attended that part of the trial? Would the same sort of disinfectant process have happened? Would I have gone? Would I have stayed? Would it have been too painful for me to really even register?

By contrast, the defense, which had begun the day before, was systematic and only occasionally slightly dramatic. The lead lawyer guided his client, Taylor, through an incredibly detailed narration of his life, in the time I was there concentrating on Taylor’s leadership of the Union of Liberian Associations, a US based group, mostly of students, which regarded itself as an important wing of the movement to first reform and then revolutionize Liberian politics. He Taylor was in the US for seven years, and became the chair of this organization, which he casually referred to as “the Union.” Also on the coup against William Talbert which put Samuel Doe in power.

An odd bureaucratic aspect: Taylor’s lawyer stopped all the time to spell into the record the names that Taylor mentioned, some I hadn’t heard of, many of which were of course Americo-Liberian names like Paul or Jones, and some were famous historic names like Nkrumah or Ben Bella. We wouldn’t want any mistakes in the details. Once, when Taylor misdated an important event (the coup d’etat that murdered William Talbert) the lawyer paused, and asked him if this was indeed the date he wished to cite; Taylor corrected himself). When I entered at noon, Taylor was talking about an even in 1979 which both of my books covered, the Rice Riots, in which I think Tubman raised the price of rice beyond what most Liberians could pay; Taylor thought this was a good idea to increase Liberian economic self sufficiency. One of the judges, the only time I heard anyone else but Taylor or his lawyer speak, wanted to make sure that the record read “rice riot” instead of, as it sounded “race riot.”

There were a few breaks in this uninflected narrative, a few flashes of anger or passion, in the laborious personal history he was laying out. Was he a Marxist Leninist like some other anti government groups at the time? Absolutely not. He was a democrat, he insisted. And what did he think of the U.S? When he got to the coup that overthrew Talbert, he accused the US of organizing it, since the two dozen men who took over the government had all just been through a US directly training program. In a longer discussion of his attitude to the US, he said he was angry on behalf of his country that the US had left Liberia, its child (he used this metaphor directly) underdeveloped, unlike France and England which had left their colonies with infrastructures, educated colonial elites, highways, economies, etc. Only Firestone, whch had come to Liberia for the US’s own strategic reasons during World War II (need of rubber).

As he was talking I was thinking about what Obama had said just the day before about Africa needing to take responsibility for its own future, despite the history of colonial exploitation. NO reference to this though. So both anger at the US and disappointed attachment. It was clear, through the language that he used, the slang and metaphors, that his years during the 1970s in the US had left a major impact on him. And yet, in one other directed answer, he insisted that he and his fellow Liberian students had established no connections with African American groups, because they realized that any such interference with US politics would have exposed them to jail or expulsion, that they had rigidly observed their obligation to steer clear of domestic engagements.

Which reminds me of one detail of this part: his account of how he was arrested in the 1970s, I think on a federal warrant and by the FBI, for purchasing guns to aid opposition forces in Liberia. I don’t remember the outcome – whether he served time, or for how long – but I do remember how he dismissed the episode – as a youthful mistake, the kind of foolish excess that student revolutionaries can make when they get overexcited about their political passions. I believe he even chuckled a bit at his own naivete.

The other part of his testimony focused on Liberian politics and his perception of and participation in, starting with what he called the fractures in the Tubman presidency, Tubman, the 27 year long president who he remained quite proud of, indeed of Liberia in general, Africa’s oldest republic, who and which had played a major role in assisting other African nations to realize their own independence. But Tubman had become too subservient to US needs and so Taylor’s story shifted to the efforts of various groups to establish an opposition party.

Tubman was succeeded by William Talbert, against whom Taylor and his fellow ULAA demonstrated – seizing the DC embassy, disrupting the General Assembly was what he said. Then Talbert invited Taylor to come to Liberia to reacquaint himself with his country. Taylor described himself as afraid that he might be arrested or murdered, himself a potential object of violence. While he was there, Samuel Doe and other very young non commissioned military offices led a coup against Talbert and murdered him. His description of the Doe coup was interesting – he emphasized the youth of the members of the coup, and their lack of education, in contrast implicitly to his own. He located himself as an educated, disciplined person who could bring the excesses of this revolution under control. (IN actuality, his educational record was not, I hink, distinguished. I believe he attended an undistinguished Boston college and I don’t think he fnished there.) He distinguished the Americo-Liberians (he is one and this is obvious by his name but he did not emphasize this) with what he called “the aborigines,” usually specified by tribe and language group and his own family affiliations or those of his “fiancé.”

He wanted, he said, to get Doe and the others “back to the barracks,” where they belonged. In his account of the coup, there was violence and chaos around him, but he was invited to join and he did so to “secure the revolution” and to – he said this several times – quiet the fears of the diplomatic community (other African nations) that the chaos and destabilization would spread beyond Liberia’s borders. (Eventually it did, which is what brought him to this tribunal.) This added to my impression that he saw himself and his actions in the context of a larger Africa. At one point, he talked with regret that original plans, (led by who?), for a fully federated United States of Africa, failed (blaming US and western fear for lack of control). Perhaps this is strategic, given that he is being tried by a country other than his own and accused and fostering violence in an adjacent Sierra Leone State (getting involved in the blood diamond trade to buy weapons.)

I left at this point. I thought several times of something that both Ellen Sirleaf Johnson and Russell Banks said about Taylor: that he was charismatic, that it was easy to believe that his intentions for Liberia were pure and good, and that he was the kind of person that people wanted to follow.

Is that what I saw?

September 1: When The Elephants Dance

We are meeting again, this time on September 1st. We will discuss Tess Uriza Holthe's novel, based in WWII Philippines.

Please read this interesting interview with the author, if you have time, or if you need help deciding to buy the book. Also, the author's website includes a great deal of information on the book and about the author, as well as an excerpt from the book.

HRW reports on current police killings in Mindanao.

Please join us!

UPDATE: Liberian Women's Movement- on TV

Check it out!
Just yesterday, Leymah Gbowee, one of the leaders of the women's movement profiled in the film, Pray the Deil Back to Hell was profiled on Bill Moyers!

The Bill Moyers website also has some useful background information, including a global map of Women in Politics in 2008.
They also mention UNIFEM's 2009 report on "Progress of the World's Women", which looks at women's participation in decision making- and this interest in women's accountability is directly connected to the momentum created by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (lots of information here).

Human Rights Watch has been active in this process, and has helped to bring the issue of women's participation in decision making and women's leadership to the undenyable attention of the United Nations, helping to shape the discussion and laying the foundation for more attention being paid to this issue in future peace keeping and peace making efforts, and Human Rights Watch continues to work on pushing this issue at the UN.

August (TBD)

We are thinking of mixing it up a little this summer and watching a movie instead of reading a book...



If we do not manage to get a copy of the film, we are planning on reading the book: When the Elephants Dance, by Tess Uriza Holthe. It is a historical novel, set in the Philippines during WWII, when the USA and Japan were fighting in the Philippines, and uses myths and stories to tell the story of civilians surviving the war.

Here is a short interview of the author.

The exact date is TBD.

June 15: This Child Will Be Great

Discussion Highlights
A timely HRW photo exhibit in New York: Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold (based on the work of a photographer who lived with the LURD) there is a short trailer video that is very interesting

We had a good discussion, with some interesting questions that came up from reading Ellen Johonson Sirleaf's book. One question was about the tone of the book, specifically the lack of any discussion of Sirleaf's emotional and personal life- a few readers found it remarkable that the author could write so matter-of-factly about her decision to leave her children behind in Liberia when she and her husband went to the USA to pursue higher education. The reserved tone and muted emotion continues throughout the book- so that we feel that we learned a lot about the contemporary political history of Liberia from Sirleaf- but very little about Sirleaf as a person. However, this stoic, fearless character is also a highly cultivated and personally valued aspect of the President's image and personality. And certainly it can be understood as a useful quality for a female politician to have.

Another very interesting set of questions was about policies dealing with child soldiers' rehabilitation in Libera, the demographics of Liberia and the effects of war on the makeup of the population, and policies dealing with women's rights and domestic violence under Sirleaf's administration. According to the CIA Factbook, the demographics of Libera for 2009 do show more women than men in the voting age groups:

0-14 years: 44.1% (male 760,989/female 758,554) 15-64 years: 53% (male 904,770/female 920,704) 65 years and over: 2.8% (male 47,013/female 49,760) (2009 est.)

Please check out this Council of Foreign Relations backgrounder for an introduction to the issue of child soldiers. In fact, many of the groups of women we learned about in the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell appear to still be active- a group of women's NGOs in Liberia (WONGOSOL) participated in a Truth and Reconciliation Commission's dialogue- they recommended amnesty for all child soldiers. There are also United Nations and foreign NGO programs for rehabilitation.

UPDATE: Check out this speech by President Sirleaf on Gender and Poverty. Also, courtesy of Ellen check out this book for your reading list (if you are interested in the subject) Russell Banks’ The Darling which is also women in the Liberian civil war, from the viewpoint of a US woman activist.

Please join us, as we discuss the recent memoir, "This Child Will Be Great", by Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the President of Liberia.

We were inspired to read this book because of the movie, Pray the Devil Back to Hell, which was screened in Los Angeles for the spring fundraiser of the Womens Rights Committee of Human Rights Watch. It is a wonderful amazing film, and everyone should see it!

President Sirleaf is the first woman to be elected president of an African country. She has had an unusual path to power for a leading politician: she was married at the age of 17 and followed her husband to the United States when he got a scholarship to study. She took the chance to pursue her own education, however, and her biography includes jobs in international finance, and a UNIFEM (United Nations Development Fund For Women) investigator.

She has appeared on The Daily Show, where she talks about her political experiences during the upheavals in Liberia. Her book has been very well reviewed by the Washington Post, as well as the Economist, and she has been interviewed by Time Magazine and NPR amond many others.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff argues, she is a sign of Africa as a "Bright Continent", full of hope.

For more information about Sierra Leone, please check out HRW reports where you can read the latest about Charles Taylor's trial in The Hague, and more.

For a quick introduction to Liberia, check out this wonderful PDF of a short lecture, created by Ghislaine Lydon, Associate Professor at UCLA's Department of History. Thanks, Ghislaine, for sharing this!GLydon on Liberia

Publish at Scribd or explore others: History Research money social

For April/ May 11th, "Slave: My True Story"

Update: We had a wonderful, wide-ranging discussion about this book. Mende's description of her childhood in the first half of the book held the interest of a number of readers. We wondered how much of what we were reading was accurate, since the book was written under such difficult circumstances, and with such limited translation. The broad strokes of the story, however, were still illuminating, and inspired discussion about how social and cultural difference is perceived, how intervention in cultures can (and should) happen, the value of self-critique, and the shocking pervasiveness of the practice of slavery- something popularly considered obsolete.

In 2008, Slave was make into a stage play. According to an online article, she is now married, living in London, and planning on becoming a hairdresser. She also managed to visit her family in Sudan.

Please join us for a very interesting discussion on May 11th.

Mende Nazer is an escaped modern-day slave. Slavery is often considered a thing of the past, but human trafficking and slavery is still a part of the global economy.

Human Rights Watch has documented harsh treatment of domestic workers in Saudi Arabia, Children working in Indonesia, Child soldiers in the Congo, Farm workers in Brazil, and the list goes on.

Mende Nazer managed to escape after she was sent to London to work (without pay and without any say in the matter) for a diplomat who was stationed there. To read a synopsis of her story, read this 2003 article.

There is also this very interesting mp3 video of a 2007 panel symposium called "Stand Up, Speak Up: an Agenda for 21st Century Women" at Agnes Scott College, on which Mende Nazer participates in a dialogue with other impressive women leaders.

My Guantanamo Diary: March 4th

UPDATE: a recent BBC article describes the contents of a report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was leaked- the report describes the torture of 14 'high value' detainees, based on interviews the ICRC conducted after the detainees arrived at Guantanamo.


Our March author, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, was a law student when she heard about the Guantanamo detainees. She is also a Pashto speaker, and she ended up working with some of the lawyers representing the detainees as a translator. The book is her account of her experience.

Human Rights Watch has done a lot of work on Guantanamo- please take a look at their Guantanamo Webpage.

Please read the NYT book review to read a complete introduction. The book also has a facebook group, which you can join if you are interested.

Please also watch this video from Current if you would like to see some footage of Guantanamo, and listen to a discussion of the closing of the camp.